December 2009

December 04, 2009

As we all know, in an era of keyword-driven advertising, ads and editorial content often end up sharing space in ironic, and sometimes humorous, absurd or counterproductive, juxtapositions. Of course, such juxtapositions aren’t limited to realm of Adsense autobots. While doing research on way the rhetoric of cosmetic surgery has been used in the past, I came across Chatelaine magazine’s guide to cosmetic surgery from 1968.

On the article’s second page (see above), notice the ad for Royal instant pudding which accompanies the copy. A perfectly smooth bowl of pink perches on a bed of pocked berries, their shapes analogous to so many faces full of large pores. Instant transformation from mature fruit to seductive dessert; a visual replication of the promise of cosmetic surgery. Brilliant.

In Bodies, Susie Orbach theorizes the
body as the home in which the self must
live.She asserts that there are
authentic bodies and false bodies, the false bodies being the ones that we
develop as early as infancy in order to please what we think are the wishes of
other people when our own needs aren't being met (thus the infant that learns not to cry
even when she’s upset).Authentic
bodies, she posits, are the ones in which our selves can live comfortably, the
bodies over which we don’t fret.Orbach’s theory, as I see it, poses some problems.When I asked her about the relationship
between the body and the self in the authentic body, her answer was that they
were the same, that “corporeal embodiment” would entail no difference between
the two.If we reject the
Cartesian mind-body duality altogether in favor of an integrated whole, this
immediately seems to send us back down the road we have been traveling a long
time, in which bodily markers will be “justifiably” read as signs of internal
characteristics of the self.Or
does the notion of authentic body require that we see the body as unreadable,
unwritable?

This gets further
complicated when we consider the question:can a body culturally marked (by cosmetic surgery or other
body modification techniques) and in which a self now feels comfortable or
empowered be an authentic body?When I posed this very question to Orbach when she presented the book's ideas at the London School of Economics, she pointed out that such
cultural marking techniques were sold to women on the basis of their empowering
results (which seemed to suggest that such a question accepted the premises of
that discourse), but in the end she did not have an answer.Granted, Orbach had to field the
question off the cuff, but the lack of a satisfactory answer to it points to a
glaring problem:what’s the
difference between an “authentic” body and an “essential” or “natural”
body?Is Orbach inadvertently taking us
back down the path to essentialism by another name?

Given the effort she makes in Bodies to show that
there is no such thing as a “natural” body, using the example of wild children
who developed internal regulatory mechanisms and other environmental
adaptations from birth, it’s highly doubtful that reviving essentialism is
Orbach’s intention.In her
conclusion, she encourages that our bodies not be seen as “sites of labor and
commercially-driven production” or “aspirations that need to be achieved”
(145).But this again points out a
conflict – she goes to such lengths to prove “that bodies are made rather than
born” while enjoining us from participating too consciously in the making
process.

Back before the club closed its doors forevermore, I sat on the
bleacher-like steps of the Opium Garden in South Beach, Miami, and
watched a breakdancer in a strategically torn t-shirt. Her athletic
body gyrated; she pop-locked, downrocked and piked and then she sat
down next to me, another girl in baggy pants, sneakers and a hat. We
watched the other action on the dance floor for a few minutes as the music kept thumping. Nearly all of the women pouting to
the beat shimmied in miniskirts, break-neck stilettos and band-aid tops, with breasts
that should have been bouncing but instead
remained firmly bolted in place. The b-girl leaned over and shouted
over the thumps: “Welcome to Miami, where you’re not allowed to live
unless you’ve got fake tits and dick-suckin’ lips.” Of course, that was
a vulgar way to put it, the stereotype of body-conscious South Beach,
but there it was.

This year, the closed club a victim of
noise complaints and rising rents, I ambled down Lincoln Mall Road in
search of a gelato. Before I got to the gelato, there it was again.

Of
course, it’s possible or even probable that these mannequins graced
Miami’s shop windows before this year and I just didn’t notice them;
I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know what to think about these real fake
ladies. Suddenly walking down Lincoln Mall Road bore a surreal
similarity to traversing yesteryear's gauntlet of sex workers in the
storefronts of Amsterdam's Red Light district.

Those
Miami mannequins displays say more about the normalization of cosmetic
surgery in our culture than most anything I can write about it, I
think. For women in places like South Beach and Los Angeles, the question of whether or not to go under the knife is moot; the question is no longer “Should I get surgery?” That we should get surgery is taken for granted. Instead, the fundamental question has become “Where should I get which surgery?”

The
mannequins also beg some questions about the aspirational nature of
window shopping. It could be argued that the mannequins represent the
body type of the average South Beach resident more than the traditional
clothes-hanger-skinny mannequin, and thus give a more realistic idea of
how the merchandise would fit potential customers. It could also be
argued that heroine-chic physiques of traditional mannequins modeled
equally unnatural body types, or that they enforced a standard of
homogeneity for the female form so the busty new gals provide some
welcome variety, at least. While that’s possible, I also wonder how
much these mannequins now commodify the body as the items for sale
versus the clothing as the items for sale. When we’re window shopping,
are we supposed to covet the merchandise or the bodies on display?

There
seems to be a sort of chicken and egg element to the issue as well.
Are mannequins like these a result of the body commodification and
normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture, or a cause of them?

December 01, 2009

In the course of the much
derided interview with the French Marie
Claire in which Demi Moore characterized rumors that she had ever had any
cosmetic surgery as ‘completely false,’ Moore also bemoaned the familiar,
age-old double standard by which ageing male actors ‘seem to get classier than
us when they age.’ Mature actors
in Hollywood, noted Moore, are seen as ‘distinguished.’

Men
become distinguished as they age, that is to say that age makes them
‘prominent, conspicuous, remarkable, or eminent;’ people whom we ‘notice
specially; pay particular attention to’ or ‘honour with special attention.’ To
distinguish also means ‘to perceive distinctly or clearly (by sight, hearing,
or other bodily sense); to ‘make out’ by looking, listening, etc.; to
recognize.’To be distinguished is
to be recognized.Not only does
the process of becoming distinguished become synonymous with being celebrated,
it becomes synonymous with being seen at all.In
a spread entitled “Celebrities Who Are Aging Well’ in the Winter-Spring 2009
issue of New Beautymagazine, the
faces of several female celebrities are analyzed. The piece opens by noting
that the women featured – including Olivia Newton-John and Demi Moore - have
successfully ‘tackled common aging concerns, all while looking gracefully
age-appropriate’ (40).

In
the analysis of Newton-John’s face, it is noted that ‘“There is a little bit of
flattening out of the upper lip and some loss of definition,” which makes her
look appropriate for her age’ (44). Loss of definition. In this language we have an enactment of
the gendered double standard. It
is appropriate that the ageing female should lose definition in her features;
that is to say, it is appropriate that her features become undistinguished.

The
homogenizing effects of the anti-ageing procedures promoted by New Beauty and widely used by female
celebrities are criticized for exactly this, that they efface faces, making
those faces indistinguishable from one another. In these attempts to defy ageing, celebrities may be
subverting the very idea of celebrity. The undistinguished is one not
recognized as different or distinct; further, the indistinguishable (i.e. the
‘imperceptible’) has not only the preceding quality, but goes unrecognized and unseen
altogether.